Availability of digital media, such as audio tracks or video clips, is expanding at a rapid pace. A common form of prescriptive digital media content comes from Rich Site Summary (RSS) feeds. RSS feeds are hosted on web servers and allow a user to subscribe to an episodic series of text, audio, or video content to be downloaded to computing devices such as a smart phone, tablet, or portable media player device. An RSS document includes full or summarized text, along with meta-data such as author's name, publishing date, and duration. The portable device constantly monitors the RSS website for updates to subscribed content, and automatically downloads the new electronic content from the host computer for consumption by the user at a later time. The selection of content, and the timing of downloads may be supported by a utility program that manages the subscription based on user preferences. An RSS reader allows the user to consume the received content offline at a convenient time.
Mobile devices, such as smart phones, tablets and portable media players, provide capabilities that were once the domain of desktop computers and laptops, such as accessing email, web browsing, reading RSS feeds, and accessing calendars for tracking meetings and appointments. Mobile calendaring applications often allow the user to set up events with alarms to notify the user of upcoming events, and provide information to the user about the event, such as topic, duration, links to electronic media content, etc.